I am sharing here an extended excerpt from my upcoming book, "An Autistic Life - Visions of Past Lifetimes' Futures". There may be some overlap with a previous excerpt... just skip over whatever you have read in past posts.
***
...
Starting Junior High school in Oroville in 1973, Steve was informed that the school's one building had been condemned and that the school system had decided to shift all the 7th and 8th graders to be integrated into the High School. A dark cloud formed in Steve's mind after she learned this harsh predicament. Thinking back to when her family first came to live in Oroville the year before, and the difficulties involved, brooded within her dark mood. The hardship of those bleak days, arriving in the tiny border town after being deported from Canada, was rearing an ugly, fear inducing ghost of those times in Steve's mind. She was determined to somehow yank peace from the gnashing teeth of chaos... again. She was determined to never again feel so undone as her whole family was by those events of 1972.
At 13 years old, Steve entered the halls of a completely dysfunctional high school for 14- to 18-year-olds, significantly more mature peers. She experienced the extremes of being pushed into a much more mature social setting than she yet had. Her hidden emotions ranged from feelings of challenge and promotion to feeling much less-than, small, vulnerable, and depressed. Blue smoke billowed down the hallways, from bathrooms, and even from the faculty lounge. Drug use of all types were the norm there. Events ensued that caused Steve to begin her lifelong hatred of the "modern" American education system.
Life as one of the novel newbies, being hazed and bullied by much older students and irritated teachers, was made less noticeable by the fact that her mother had abandoned her brother and herself, forcing Steve once again into rigid autistic survival mode. Neither child ended up finishing their years of Junior High or much of High School. Each of the next three years they were uprooted some weeks or months before school ended and moved to another county or state. Circumstances demanded they both grow up as fast as possible. And, to never again rely upon their mother for support; be it emotional, spiritual, or financial. In short, their mother became completely dysfunctional and nobody in society did a damn thing to help her or her two children. This meant Steve's two half-sisters ended up taking up the slack, as it were, eventually. Fortunately, both older daughters of their mother's first marriage did intercede, reluctantly and very occasionally, for Steve and her brother. But that time was not just yet.
Hiding was ingrained in the Gandy family DNA. Throughout the ages, these people of the new birth, these Homo infomaticus people, had to hide from the vicious, xenophobic, murderous Homo sapiens, simply to survive. A war between these two subspecies, that no one is ever educated in school about, has raged between these two human sub-groups, continuing until modern times. Now this war is at an end. Or is it?
As would happen to Steve many times throughout her life, and as she discovered in all her previous lifetimes, she was directly hypnotized by her mother before she left the state. Rosey gave explicit instructions as she looked steadily into Steve's eyes, not to try to contact her father, never to mention that her mother had left town, and to always look out for Clyde. Steve could not remember at the time, of course, that these hypnotic sessions had taken place. This was sometimes because of her autistic selective memory, coinciding with her mother's hypnosis. Autistic automatic forgetting was a problem for her throughout her life, every lifetime.
At other times, autistic researchers and even some devil-controlled criminal ne'er-do-wells had deeply hypnotized her to cause her to do things she would never have done, otherwise. They were careful to give hypnotic instructions to make sure she could only remember their instructions subconsciously, not at all consciously. Rosey and the devil often had their way with her, causing the value of her life to often be minimized, diminished, reduced to being seen as only some transgender weirdo to be exploited. Rosey did it to attempt to hide herself and her children from violent xenophobic Homo sapiens. The devil did it to attempt to destroy Steve's humanity. In her old age, Steve was able to remember all these dozens of times she was hypnotized, and the people who did so. At least several of these hypnotic sessions were performed by autism researchers with seemingly well-intentioned motivations.
During their forced isolation, Steve and Clyde did the best they could to stay out of trouble and keep body and soul together. Clyde took it the hardest, staying alone in one corner of the living room, mostly listening to the AM radio and doodling. One day he began drawing a sketch of a Bengal tiger on a large piece of meat-wrapping paper. Steve later learned that Clyde was frantically thinking of some way to ingratiate himself to their father, with art, since he knew Joe loved art. He was hoping Joe would take him back to live with him. Steve was critical of the final drawing, so Clyde started on a new version. After three tries over several weeks, Clyde had a pen and ink drawing that looked quite a descent portrait of a resting tiger. Many years later, Steve inherited the drawing, which their late father ended up framing and placing on his den wall.
Chapter 2 — Brothers, Four Months Alone
Mother never returned. Steve was 13 years old. Inside she felt maybe about 9, emotionally. Intellectually she was in her early 20s. Just so nobody outside the family ever saw her perform her smarts, she felt safe. It was a private thing, along with her bedroom, which she had turned into a cluttered personal research laboratory. At school she was automatically careful not to perform beyond a minimally required level.
At a surface of intellectual thought, she understood her mother had originally intended the best, in the same way that government agents babbled and fumbled about, in their vain attempts to entrap and build false cases against her, fifty years later. Their mother had been desperately fleeing the very same people. Steve realized this in old age. She had never really understood her mother's very sane, but hidden motivations to run, until she was older than her mother had been while they were running. But, in those early 1970s, Steve felt abandoned and outright betrayed by her well-meaning mother. As she entered her teens, she rose to the challenge, becoming a substitute father and mother to her younger brother. The experience left a deep scar in both children.
Now Steve embodied completely sick thorns of abscess. She had the empty, cold, worthless feeling of being completely undone. Her mother's abandonment dissolved a thin thread of trust that had endured in Steve, up until that moment at least. She never trusted anyone, fully, ever again.
Steve became so distressed that she woke up slightly. She found that she could focus her thoughts narrowly when she was alone, which she constantly was in those days. She remembered the faux cattle ranch laboratory in Montana, called the Smith Ranch. It was while there that Steve first remembered events from previous lifetimes, through nightly vision dreams. She remembered having some abilities, such as telepathy, and of having a special ability: knowing events that would unfold in the future, based on experiences in nearly identical recent previous lifetimes.
Perhaps there was some way she could earn enough money to move the two of them to Wyoming to get back together with their mother, Steve daydreamed. However, although she could not come up with a scheme that could work, she was able to remember the one time in her life when she had managed to sell things of her own creation. This resulted in a brick wall with a dark cloud over it in her mind, blocking any pursuit of such an idea. This was because of a very negative experience with selling her own handmade things. This occurred in Kim, Colorado, when she was in 3rd grade.
On her own, Steve had created genuinely nice lacey cards for valentine’s day and other occasions. Rosey said they looked great, so Steve sold them for 30 cents each at school; mostly to girls her age. The school immediately complained to Rosey in a note home and told Steve she could not sell anything at school, except for school sanctioned candy bars for fundraisers, of course. This was another nail in the grade school experience coffin for Steve. She never tried to sell anything she created to anyone after that. It was not until well into her 20s that she ever again seriously considered having her own business.
Every night, Steve worried and worried about being abandoned by her parents. She racked her brain to understand how they ever got into such a nightmare. This brought on long reveries that calmed her and helped her remember better days of the past, in her young childhood. She remembered some of the early awakening events in Montana in 1971, only a couple of years before. She had happy memories that helped her wake up her ability to think deeper and more creatively, even as she remained in a heavy, depressed, and hopeless funk. She counted her blessings in memories of those days in Montana.
She thought of her first new friend, back in Montana in 1970. He was a boy with a withered arm, named Sid, who accepted Steve's strange way of looking at things without judgement. In turn, Steve showed no prejudice because of his miniature arm. This is while the Gandys were living in the middle of a giant alfalfa field in a single-wide house trailer, several months before they moved to the Smith Ranch. That is where Steve's father Joe was woken up and tested. During that precarious time, Joe supported his family by changing irrigation pipes. Steve helped her father move pipes for weeks that summer. It was all she could do to pick up one of the long aluminum pipes and walk it to the next row, 50 feet away.
The small Gandy family was so jangled and upset during those days that Joe and Rosey actually had arguments, sometimes quite loudly. This was a very unusual development, as Steve's parents had almost never had any kind of heated discussion or serious disagreement in her presence. One time a few years later, before she abandoned Joe, Rosey slapped him during an argument. One time. Joe never once hit her, no matter how angry he got. Striking his children on a few occasions was another matter. During this uncertain time of upset, Steve became even more withdrawn into herself than usual. She spent as much time alone in her and her brother's bedroom as she could; doodling, daydreaming, and mostly building model cars. By the age of 19, Steve built about 200 plastic models of all kinds. Building models became a therapeutic self-help activity for her.
The Gandy's lives improved significantly after they moved onto the nearby Smith Ranch. It presented as a relatively large cattle ranch that supplied many things missing from their lives. Steve remembered best the little kid, long backpacking camping trips with her brother and a few other prepubescent boys, which she initiated into the rites of camping, and managed on her own. Fishing and catching many trout, then cooking them in a small tin skillet over a campfire was a happy memory. Steve also became interested in photography, especially of wildlife and the breathtakingly beautiful scenery all around them. Building a winter trap line to capture gophers, learning to ride motorcycles, and coming up with small inventions occupied her mind and body. She even spent a few months in the Boy Scouts, until realizing how sick the alcoholic scout leader was; then quitting with her parents' approval.
Decades later, after being physiologically awake for several years, Steve was certain that the Smith Ranch had in reality been another in-situ lab. She remembered a distinct pang of fear after Sid told her that the Smith Ranch was sold to a stranger to the area, named Mr. Smith only a year before. He said that the surrounding farmers and ranchers distrusted the goings on there. At the time, in atypical neurodivergent fashion, Steve had forgotten what she was told in only a few seconds.
Memory was a tricky area for Steve. She had Severe autistic selective memory that operated like an instant Fort Knox of personal memory access. So many subjects that Steve learned well were automatically and completely forgotten. This was especially true for any strange or threatening interaction with people. Her being intersex was one of these areas of forgetting. She completely forgot a doctor discovering she was intersex, as a 9-year-old child. She forgot 3 other doctors, throughout her life, who also discovered she was intersex.
Beginning in 1969, physicians who examined Steve always became quite variously excited or disturbed to discover she contained both male and female genitals. Later in life, before she woke up and was able to always remember being intersex, the doctor would accuse her of not being forthright, of not informing the doctor of her "condition", as if she had somehow misled the demanding doctor. Steve's automatic forgetting had long kept her from remembering anything about it. She always demanded to know what 'intersex' was, and why the doctor could possibly think any such thing of her person. She simply could not ever remember the reality that was first discovered when she was 9 years old. They demanded to know why she had never had the required sexual assignment surgery. Perplexed and feeling very threatened by such talk, Steve would become angry and quickly leave, never to talk to that doctor again. By the time she entered her 60s, she had been in a doctor's office exactly 19 times, this lifetime.
In late fall of 1972, when Steve's family first ended up homeless in Oroville, Washington, they barely survived by picking up rotting Winesap apples from under frozen orchard trees. They lived in a room in the Alaska Highway View Hotel for 8 dollars per night. Steve was allowed to keep a small part of what she had earned picking up apples. The first thing she bought was a fancy Barbie doll wearing a flowing Spanish style lacey dress and hat. She was surprised to find it in a tiny curio shop right next door to the hotel. Steve tried to hide it from her parents, who only remembered him as being a boy. Their autistic selective memory worked in the same way her's did. Anything threatening was either immediately or soon completely forgotten. Steve's dad was sick about it when he finally saw the doll. Rosey took it away from Steve that night. Steve felt completely betrayed by her parents. Not only had their poor planning stranded them in the hotel, they also interfered in many of his interests.
In 1973, Steve was becoming interested in girls, rock and roll, and science. A couple of years before she had dedicated herself to being 'straightedge', consuming no drugs or alcohol. In fact, she never tried anything other than drinking alcohol until the age of 38. That is when she medicinally smoked cannabis for the first time.
***
Meanwhile, back in 1974, Steve's reverie was interrupted by Clyde handing her the mail, which had just arrived on a Saturday. There was a letter from their mother. Steve carefully opened it and read through it quickly.
"What does she say? Is she coming home?" Clyde excitedly demanded.
Steve tried to concentrate as she read the letter through completely. Mother was not coming home. She required them to pack up their possessions and move to Wyoming to be with her, somehow, by themselves.
Steve stammered at Clyde, "Hold on! Well, just wait... I'm trying to get this. But no... she isn't coming back."
Clyde started crying and ran to his bed. Steve finally decoded his mother's instructions completely. He was supposed to send Clyde by Trailways bus to Wyoming, ticket to later come by mail. The local garbage hauler family would load all their stuff into the back of a cleaned-up garbage truck and drive it and Steve to Wyoming. Now it was Steve's turn to cry. She could not even see her little brother going on a long trip on a bus by himself, much less any of the rest of it. She felt undone. Again.
At dinner time, Steve carefully explained what their mother wanted them to do. Clyde absolutely refused. By the next day Steve had drilled it into him that he would be getting on a bus in a couple of weeks. She advised Clyde to stop going to school in a few days. Personally, Steve planned to attend for only 1 more day. She was too sleep deprived, jangled, and upset to take school seriously anymore; if she ever did.
Clyde was as scared as any 11-year-old autistic kid would be. He had never been on any journey by himself before. Steve tried to console Clyde as best she could, trying not to worry him with her own grave misgivings about the whole sorry plan.
***
Steve nearly talked the ears off the two men her mother had remotely hired to move their meager belongings in their old truck all the way to a small mountain ranch in Wyoming. Hypervigilance set on high, Steve was intensely focused on survival. This meant the men felt overwhelmed with her constant talking, explaining many things beyond their interest and understanding, and generally yammering non-stop. She was desperately trying not to feel frightened on the two-day drive with two strange men. They begged her to stop talking, several times per day. She was a typical "little professor", as many high-functioning Aspies are.
Mother was still in the hospital when Steve arrived in Wyoming. Rosey's life was hanging on by a thin margin of oxygen starvation. Double pneumonia raged on, hour by hour, day after day, ruining and rending her body towards death. Steve and Clyde were allowed to see her twice in a month. The Severe family barely assisted, often demanding of Steve, "When will that mother of yours actually become useful to us? If she dies, you two boys will need to be placed in a foster home, somewhere. Maybe you two could start doing chores for us? Your momma is useless to us!"
Steve determined to make the best of things. She arrived at the ranch to find a despondent Clyde in another little shack of a house, assigned to them. He had been living for several days alone in the shack, surviving on toast, cereal, and hotdogs. Steve had never seen her little brother so jumpy and strange; suffering from serious sleep deprivation. He said he had been taken, one time, to see their mother in the hospital. Steve did not get to see her for two days more.
Clyde said, "She was having a hard time breathing, and in an oxygen tent. I'm really worried Steve. What are we going to do?"
Steve crossed her arms and stared at Clyde grimly. Her brother was voicing the same fear she had about their mother.
"Look Clyde! Mom is going to be okay... she just needs to recover in the hospital and then we'll be doing fine," Steve encouraged.
Six weeks passed. During that time Steve worked hard to get them both into a regular routine, feeding Clyde and helping him get into a normal sleep cycle again. She mothered him as best she knew how.
***
The next night, in early spring of 1974, the Spirit moved in Steve strongly. Through blinding tears she fearfully ran down to the Severe’s nice family home from the shack where she and Clyde had been living. She demanded to be allowed to use their telephone to call family for help. Rosey had made a hard and fast rule that Steve must not let anyone know where they were or how badly she had screwed up. Steve could not care less about her mother's unreasonable demands for another second.
She glared at Mrs. Severe and said, "My mom is not going to be working for you... I can see that. Just let me use your phone and I will call my older sister? It will be a collect call... I'm pretty sure she will accept the charges... will you let me do that? She may help me get my brother and me out of here!"
"Certainly, you can. I hope she can come get you boys and your mother. It is clear that your mother is not going to be working for us, anymore. We have not known what to do. You certainly can't stay here on the ranch much longer. Go ahead and call your sister," Mrs. Severe coldly replied as she let Steve into the house.
As soon as she had the phone in her hand, Steve ignored the ranch family and forced herself to an angry stillness. She asked the operator to call her sister in Southeastern Colorado, person-to-person and collect. When her older half-sister Edith answered the phone, Steve coldly and quickly begged her for help. She spilled out the whole sick mess in about 15 seconds. She talked so quickly that Edith had to ask her to repeat everything, slowly, because she could not understand anything said.
Gathering all her 13 years of maturity, clamping down on her jaw so she might stop vibrating, Steve ground out, "We need help! Momma has screwed up bad! She is dying in the hospital here in Wyoming! That is where we are now. She divorced our dad. I have been raising Clyde by myself four months now! The two of us are about to be put in a foster home!"
She begged her sister to understand and to come get them. Her sister talked with her husband Delvin, the farmer for a few minutes. When she got back on the phone, she sounded genuinely concerned and assured Steve that her husband would be leaving with a truck to drive up to Wyoming to move their momma, Steve, and Clyde down to live with them in Colorado. He would arrive in 2 days.
Steve got off the phone, coldly informed the Severes that they would all be leaving 2 days, that their mother would never be working for them again and thanked them for the use of the phone. Steve trudged up the hill with a glimmer of hope in her heart and made it all the way back to the shack, ran in the door and slammed it. Then she slid down on the floor screaming in emotional pain. She curled into a fetal position and cry-screamed through clenched teeth for a solid minute. The strain and overbearing pressure Steve had been living with, in survival mode, came rushing out — bringing out powerful emotions — and a beginning of catharsis. Clyde stood over her, distraught and begging to know how Steve was injured. Finally, concern for Clyde caused her to regain enough composure to sit up and smear the snot and tears away from her face.
Shaking hard, she explained, "Clyde, I just talked with Edith in Colorado, on the Severe's phone. At least they would let me call her, you know? Delvin is coming in his truck to get us in 2 days. We're gonna' pick mom up from the hospital in town and then we're all gonna' live with them in Colorado. We're getting out of here, Clyde!"
Clyde got so happy and excited that he actually tried to cheer Steve up, an unusually mature thing for him to do. He went into the kitchen and yelled back, "I'm gonna make us bologna sandwiches!"
***
Living in Southeastern Colorado again was not in any of Steve's personal plans. Yet that is exactly where she found herself in April 1974. By this time Steve had successfully blocked any of the harsher memories of the last 8 months. She noticed that she had embraced emotionally divorcing her mother from her life. They continued to live in each other's presence. For a few more years, anyway. The showdown with her mother had to wait a couple of months, until Rosey had recovered quite a bit.
It was epic. Steve read Rosey the riot act, loudly listing off all the crazy, irresponsible things she had put Steve and Clyde through, and made it quite clear that although she was only 13 years old, Steve was done with anything more to do with her mother. Steve loudly declared that she would be living on her own, soon.
Rosey took a few more weeks to recover from pneumonia. Steve spent most of her time out of doors and avoiding having any conversation with her. She did have many private talks with Edith and Delvin.
"I am done with mom, Edith. I've been following your rule to not make her upset. But now she is starting to order me around, again. She will never put me through any more crap, ever again! She just doesn't get it. She doesn't think she did anything wrong! Can't you and Delvin adopt me and Clyde? It is really clear that mom has no idea what she is doing, as a mother or in any other way," Steve complained, deep pain in her voice as tears flowed down her face.
"Well... I do understand Steve. I really do. There was a time when she abandoned me and my younger sister when we were about your age. Our old German daddy had no idea how to raise us by himself. She left us in Texas and came up here to Colorado by herself, to live with her aunt, Helena Groden. I had my fill of her then, let me tell you! But there is no way we could even afford to take you and your brother on, along with our three kids. I will talk with Devlin about it, though. I really do understand the mess she has caused, believe you me!" Edith responded with deep sympathy in her voice.
The next day she carefully informed Steve that Devlin was having none of it. He wanted Rosey and her two kids out of their hair and down the road someplace else, anywhere, so long as it was far from his family. Steve felt forlorn and worthless. She saw little hope for their immediate future.
As she started to cry, Edith quickly reached out to her and said, "But that doesn't mean Devlin and I are going to abandon you the way momma just recently did with you and Clyde. We are still talking about ways to help you and our mother. The Lord will provide a way for you to be happy and we will make sure momma never does anything like this crazy running off, ever again. We are here for you... we really are."
And true to her word, Edith and Devlin did take on helping the three of them, even though it sometimes meant creating a financial and emotional hardship for their own family for years. Devlin even found a way to buy a small house Rosey and her "boys" could live in, some 30 miles away in Kim, Colorado. Devlin's mother also tried to help Rosey recover from her issues. She had a college education that included basic understanding of psychology. It was she who first introduced Rosey, Steve, and Clyde to the idea of a medical malady called 'clinical depression', which none of them had ever heard of before. And they lived it every day.
***
Most of the other kids on the bus were singing 'American Pie' by Don McClean. Steve joined in quietly halfway through, although she knew her singing sounded terrible. She did not care.
Someone made fun of Sid, Steve's friend with the withered arm.
"Hey weirdo! Keep your creepy baby hand away from me! I don't wanna catch that weird disease you have," an older boy taunted Sid.
Steve jumped out of her seat and went off on the bully. "Stop bothering him! He can't help it if his arm stopped growing. The rest of him is just fine and you don't have a right to tease him about it. He's my friend, and I wouldn't be friends with him if he wasn't smart. He's a heck of a lot smarter than you!" She yelled at the big oaf.
The bully jumped into the isle and started approaching Steve. "You are just as weird as he is! I think you need a bloody nose, ya little twirp!" He yelled as he advanced on Steve. Steve picked up one of his hardback books, preparing to defend herself.
Suddenly the bus lurched to a stop and the bus driver looked up in her large rearview mirror. She yelled at them, "If you two don't stop that damned racket and sit down, right now, I am sending you both to the principal’s office when we get to school! Stop it! Now!"
The bully growled at Steve, "I'll get you after school!"
He slunk back to his seat and Steve chose to remain quiet. But, in her mind she saw herself giving the bully a bloody nose, if he really did attack her after school. She turned and saw that Sid was looking down out of the bus window. His face was red with shame. Steve's heart reached out to him.
She sat back down beside him and tried to console him, "Don't worry Sid. It's gonna be okay... you hear me? Don't you ever take that shit from anybody, you hear me? There is nothing weird about you. Shoot, I never even notice your smaller arm, anymore. You hear me? You're stronger and smarter than that asshole will ever be!"
In the big Smith Ranch house, 11-year-old Steve slept fitfully. She dreamed many vision dreams during this time. This night she had a dramatic vision dream of events from a previous lifetime.
Steve stood in a large panspermia corps spaceship, being transported from the surface of a devastated Earth, like a galactic hitchhiker. There were dozens of other humans with her. She was looking out a 12 foot by 8-foot porthole at the rings of Saturn from only a few thousands of miles away. They humans were being lectured by one of the ship's crewmembers about the recent origins of the rings and why they were placed there, some 10,000 years before. Steve noticed that layers of the rings looked woven and structured; a design that proved they were now very degraded remnants of a super-giant, flat, purposely designed ring world. Unfortunately, she could not remember what the E.T. explained, exactly. But the gist was that Saturn's rings had been purposely placed there and had something to do with the biblical Flood that had destroyed most of the life on Earth.
Steve woke up screaming again. This time, however, they were happy, laugh out loud until tears ran down her face screams. Rosey came rushing up the stairs and burst into Steve's bedroom.
"What in the world is going on, Steve?" She demanded, frantic and still woozy with sleep.
"Momma! Momma! I'm gonna' be an astronaut... I think!" Steve replied excitedly.
"You had another one of those dreams, didn't you? It's just a dream. You don't know that anything in your dreams will ever happen," she consoled and cajoled at the same time.
"No! This was real. I was there. Momma! I saw the rings of Saturn, up close. I will be there some day, right nearby them. Momma, the rings are braided!" Steve informed her tensely. This was in 1971.
The ship was approximately 15 miles long, 5 miles wide, and 10 miles tall. It was of a very dark crimson red color. Most of the ship was completely empty. The crew presented as 8-foot-tall perfect looking hominids. They occasionally answered Steve's questions, but in the same way a man rubs a dog's head when the dog seeks attention. They were definitely at least thousands of years more advanced than Earth humans. The journey took about 6 years. Steve and all other humans wore very lightweight tunics made of something finer than silk and stronger than spun glass. They were fed one thing only; a completely odorless and tasteless liquid which looked like thick, clean water with the consistency of congee. Although some said it was like drinking snot, it kept everyone strong and healthy.
The first stop was in orbit over Saturn. The ship used very advanced teleportation translation (movement) technology, which meant that it never seemed to move. When Steve looked out a port window, she saw the current star patterns as fixed points of light. Then, if she waited and watched long enough, she would see a sudden significant change in the pattern. This occurred immediately after jumping forward some billions of miles closer to the core of the Milky Way galaxy. She was able to learn from the crew that each jump took over 8 gigajoules of energy, which required a recharge cycle of about half an hour between jumps. Thus, there was no need for a Faster Than Light (FTL) drive, which would be much slower and much more dangerous. Steve hammered the crew with questions. About 1 out of 50 questions were ever answered. They were unceremoniously deposited on the surface of the New Earth 6 years later.
After being awakened in her mid-40s, Steve began remembering many other details from previous lifetimes. She also distinctly remembered all the things in her current life that were automatically forgotten. For instance, just as on the ranch in Colorado, there had been a live-in autism researcher on the Smith Ranch in Montana. She remembered noticing that the supposedly brain damaged brother of the ranch's owner, who lived quietly in the basement, was actually closely watching Steve, Clyde, and their friends at play. He also scribbled in his little notebook during 'dream reenactments' Steve led. Whenever Steve noticed him, he would suddenly completely shut down and turn away.
She was astonished to remember that Joe, Steve's father, would complain of having nothing to do on that ranch, after all the cattle were sold and the owner was not buying any more to replace them. The "owner" was the old autism researcher. Joe took long naps on the floor behind the living room sofa. Of course, he showed the horses a lot of attention, also. Her mother was also acting strangely. Rosey collected many strange curios and, for once, took an interest in major home interior improvements.
After settling into a new grade school in Montana, Steve became fast friends with a brilliant young artist, Dale Zimmerman. Dale was also a budding storyteller who accepted her as a very close friend. Of course, Steve was living as all boy, back then. Dale invited Steve for sleepovers at his house. Steve found Dale's family home quite different than any she had ever experienced. The family seemed rich to Steve, although they were barely considered middle class. Normally, Steve found rich people repugnant, usually. Steve found a friend who also declared himself to be straightedge; both eschewing any type of drug. They were both 11 years old.
Whenever Dale showed Steve his cartoon drawings, she was astonished at how quite excellent they were. Steve encouraged Dale to become a serious philosopher and artist, which is exactly what he did, a couple of decades later. Dale once recoiled from Steve and spent less time with her after she attempted to kiss him. And Dale never knew that Steve's female intersex side was the one with the crush. Intersex is the 'i' in LGBTQIA+.
Other than Dale and a couple of other peers, Steve was not interested in socializing with any of the other kids at school. She was usually bored at school and often went off on her own little adventures, sometimes in the middle of class. Steve remembered past lifetimes of much sexual adventure. Slight memories of such vision dreams fueled much of her stranger behaviors. She would suddenly get an intriguing idea, stand up, and walk out of the room. Sometimes she walked out of school and down the street.
Her first teacher in Montana was a Severe, narrow-minded, middle-aged woman. She often ridiculed Steve, which caused Steve to be unfairly ostracized by some of the other students. She railed at Steve for writing a book report on the science fiction novel 'Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters'. She did this in front of the class, shaming Steve forever daring to be thinking such alarming science fiction counted as any kind of literature to ever be read, much less having an opinion about. This teacher was visibly alarmed by the ideas of the story and acted outright paranoid as she placed a large red 'F' on the paper for the whole class to see. This small-minded schoolteacher publicly humiliated Steve. The ignorant teacher made it clear that in her xenophobic, frightened, prejudiced, stupid opinion, all science fiction was garbage, never to be seen as literature. She warned the class angrily that no one else had better read, much less write a book report about such "trash". Several other teachers treated sci-fi similarly throughout Steve's childhood. It unfolded as no mystery as to why Steve became a committed autodidact.
Fortunately, such narrow-minded stultifying teaching did not prevail. Never in history has such blatant censorship overcome truth. Many great writers have long produced giant tomes of true literature, classified as Science Fiction. Starting in 1893 with Gustavus W. Pope's 'Journey to Mars', and soon after that, H.G. Wells’ 'The War of the Worlds'. Of course, Ray Bradbury and many other sci-fi authors have written fine literature, that was misunderstood by such tiny minded idiots in the so called "Great American Education System".
Steve checked out of any interest in public education completely, at that time; labeling adults outside her immediate family as blind, deaf, stupid animals, incapable of thinking critically about any actually important issue. She tuned out most teachers, ever after. She became absorbed into her own little seemingly random world. She began to notice the deep beauty and dramatic natural landmarks of the Ruby Valley, in Montana, where they lived many miles south of Dillion.
On the very long bus rides to and from grade school, Steve tried to stay disconnected from the loud, uninteresting spectrum of country kids, very unlike herself. She tended to hang around with Dale at school, but with Sid on the bus. Sid lived on the same southern school bus route, while Dale lived in Dillion. They spent up to 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, riding the public-school bus. Most days she was teased and hazed by someone on the bus, usually an older kid. This constituted a real hardship for a high-functioning autistic kid, contributing to Steve's growing hatred of the dysfunctional rural U.S. education system. To cope, she learned to continually dissociate and develop a rich internal fantasy story life.
It was during this time that Steve dived headlong into her own private, undirected scientific explorations of our shared reality. She became a genuine junior scientist, using a small microscope to study plants, earth, water organisms, bacteria, and micro-surfaces of everyday objects. Understanding the basics of electricity, electronic circuits, and remote control. She invented many gadgets, mostly in secret. Occasionally she devised something which could not be hidden, such as remote control of her bedroom's light switch by the door. She rigged up a system of tiny picture-hanger eyelets across the ceiling and down the walls to conduct very small gauge fishing lines; one pulled to turn the light off, the other pulled to turn it on. Everyone who saw it in action expressed amazement, including Joe. Steve was happy with the positive attention but did not see what was so interesting about such a simple invention. She had invented much more interesting things but did not feel safe to share any of that, even with her family.
She also had many vivid vision dreams during this time. She tried her best to interpret what small parts of vision dreams she could remember. She sometimes entered meditation reveries that led to a childish acting out of events she saw in vision dreams, especially those she had no personal knowledge of. These vision dreams included flying various aircraft, living apart from all other humans, strange sexual experiences — for which she had no local references — being prepubescent. And of people she had known in previous lifetimes while employed in fascinating occupations. She had been a person who, in previous lifetimes, had nothing to do with the simple agrarian lifestyle practiced by Joe and Rosey Gandy.
Steve did not feel accepted by her peers, nor understood by her family. She was expected to always be all 'boy,' while in reality being also physiologically 'girl'. Her intersex reality was hidden from everyone, including herself, by her autistic automatic forgetting. It also helped that her vagina was mostly hidden.
Part of the way she coped with her situation was to isolate in a way that made her feel safe. In the big three-story ranch house in Montana, she found a small cubby hole in the attic that she made into her own little private space. She ran a hidden extension cord up to it and installed a small desk lamp and an old AM radio there. She would stay up secretly, long after her parents thought she was sleeping in her bed, listening quietly to radio stations hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
Steve had a great many heavy vision dreams during her 10th, 11th, and 12th years of age. She lived on the Smith Ranch when she had most of these, including some early dreams about the sky being on fire:
Within months after the end of One World, the galactic pulse arrived. The sky was completely on fire with falling stars — micrometeorites by the billions. A wall of fast-moving sand-sized meteors came burning down the sky. The dust extended throughout the solar system; a giant wave front of exploded matter moved quickly passed the Sun. Even though it moved quickly, the band of dust was still large enough to block most sunlight for a few months. The sun became a dark light in a very dark months of dark. The moon could be seen, but just as a barely lit crimson red haze in the sky. It is possible that the fiery radiation event Steve and others experienced deep underground was caused by a Solar Flare, coincident with the arrival of the Galactic Pulse.
After a fire blasted the whole face of the globe, possibly caused by a solar flare, the surface temperature of Earth quickly dropped to less than -200 °F. People had only a few days to get deep underground before this extinction event occurred. If anyone took the One World ID chip into their body, they did not survive. No one who took "The Mark" was allowed to live; they all died in screaming pain, their flesh melting off their bones. Steve personally witnessed this happening to another person, hiding underground with the few others and her, who did not take the chip into their bodies. Extreme radiation made everyone else sick as well. Those who were already sick or weak, died. Most of the people huddling underground with Steve survived. Only one of them had accepted the One World ID chip. It seemed to be the reflected radiation from the ID chip in his body that sickened them more, as it melted him.
[This ending of the Excerpt was neglected on first posting]
Because of much positive feedback about some editorials Steve had written; published in the school's weekly newspaper, Steve was asked to give speeches at local civic clubs. She was also asked to do a weekly radio spot, where she gave an update on events at the high school. Although the parents were generally very happy with Steve's scathing editorials in the High School weekly newspaper, his fellow students rarely agreed. His articles were: anti-drugs, anti-hazing, and calling always for students to develop a spiritual life.
All the military academies and ivy league schools, simply based on Steve's test scores, demanded that Steve attend their particular prestigious institution. This was based on Steve's scoring high on the PSAT test, his Junior year. The high school's principle called Steve to his office. He told Steve to sit down.
"You have been selected for a high honor, Steve. We don't get too many students that score nearly the level you did on your PSAT test. So, now there is this Air Force major Thompson here to see you. I think he is going to go over having you apply for admission to the Air Force Academy," he said.
Steve stared at her principle with her eyes wide. She had no idea what he was talking about. While her PSAT scores totaled a bit over 1400, she did not know how high the scale went, so she thought she had done about average. Typical for her during her teens, she had forgotten a family trip to Denver to visit her old daddy's brother when she was 8. While returning to South Eastern Colorado, they had actually stopped for a visit at the Air Force Academy outside of Colorado Springs. She had no recollection of it ten years later; her autistic forgetting mechanism fully activated.
The principle watched her mull it over for half a minute. Hesitantly, Steve said, "Okay... I'm only interested in the Air Force if I can fly jets, though."
"Well, maybe you could. I don't know. But, anyway, he's waiting for you in the library's meeting room. Go down there and listen to what he has to say," the principle instructed.
Steve walked down the hallway to the library with her eyebrows arched up the whole way. As she entered the little meeting room she was impressed by the stacks of ribbons sticking out on the major's uniform. He smiled slightly and shook hands with her.
"Well, you must be Steve Gandy. I am very pleased to meet you. Now, normally when I do these things I have at least 3 or 4 students. But... you are the only one that scored high enough in the Okanogan valley, this year. Anyway, it will be the same presentation," the man said matter-of-factly.
The major proceeded to give a detailed presentation, complete with a slide show and an audio recording, promoting the Air Force Academy and all it had to offer potential cadets. Steve was impressed. The major handed her a thick folder of promotional material.
Then he emphasized the importance of the Academy by stating, "This is a 4-year degree program second to none. You will receive a hundred-thousand dollar education, free of charge. Well, except for your 6 years of service after graduation, of course. It is how great leaders are often created."
But, Steve only had one question that mattered to her. She said, "That's great. But, will I be flying jets?"
The major stared at her for a moment, then replied with a little sadness in his voice, "With your bad eyesight? No, sorry... flying is out of the question. You will be part of the Information Technologies sector of the Air Force. You'll learn to program computers, do cryptography, or whatever you want. But, you will never fly for the Air Force."
Steve thought for a moment and then replied tersely, "Well, then I'm not interested!"
Deep within herself, Steve knew the real reason was because the Air Force judged something about her person that kept her from qualifying for flight duty, regardless of her high qualifications. She could not remember, at the time, that she was actually intersex, or she would have put binary digits together and found the real reason. Her automatic autistic selective memory was always at work while she slept walked through life. She found out many years later that people with bad eyesight had become military jet pilots, after having permanent contacts implanted. Admittedly, they were undoubtably rich and powerful men's sons, so even if that had been her family situation, blatant prejudice against her non-binary gender would still have prevented her from flying for the military.
She never did write her Senator or the President of the USA to request an appointment. In multiple past lifetimes, however, Steve had been a successful graduate of the U.S. Airforce Academy. That is how Steve could relate to Corey Goode’s story so exactly.